I was reading Jared Diamond's book "The Third Chimpanzee" and in one chapter he talks about how the Tasmanian aborigines somehow lost the ability to make bone tools and even the ability to create fire. I found this fact astonishing so I had to check it out.

The excuse of course is that they were isolated for 10,000 years. Sorry, I don't buy it. I compare it with the fact that Australian aborigines were sitting on a continent with one the worlds largest source or iron ore deposits for 50,000 years, and never developed metallurgy. Here's a pic showing a huge deposit just sitting on the surface. http://www.portergeo.com.au/tours/ir...n2002depm1.asp

Thankfully the white settlers eliminated this embarrassment to our species.

Is anyone else thinking about that scene from the end of the film "Quest for Fire?"

There were too many "types" of human in that movie. There were the furry
Wagabou, the cannibalistic Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnons, and the brainy
river-people. Those brown river-people had it all: fire-starting, atlatl spear-
throwers, stone lance points, pottery, woven huts, religion complete with
shaman, institutionalized prostitution, and BEER! This was 70,000 years ago,
and there are tribes on Earth today who haven't advanced that far! I found
it very unlikely that that many varieties of human existed on the same continent
at the same time.

The scene at the end: Race-mixing!!

__________________

TANSTAAFL

"It's always been easier for a totalitarian regime to
simply kill dissidents rather than try to persuade them."BoloMK30

"The Wind that overturns the World is even now sighing on the horizon."
Robert A. Heinlein

As far as I know, at time if European contact, the Tasmanians did not possess knowledge of fire. They ran around naked, huddling behind natural windbreaks in a climate roughly equal to that of England. Peking man had fire and that was, what, 500,000 years ago-- and with a 1000 cc brain?